Les Fleur colorful paper plate

Les Fleurs Leaves Paper Party Plate

$9.00
Sale price  $9.00 Regular price 
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Les Fleur colorful paper plate
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Les Fleurs Leaves Paper Party Plate

$9.00
Sale price  $9.00 Regular price 
Description

The Les Fleurs paper plates place vintage botanical illustrations against hand-marbled grounds in the tradition of the finest French decorated papers: botanical leaves and open-faced blooms rendered with the careful draftsmanship of a 19th-century horticultural plate, set against the fluid, unrepeatable patterns of marbled paper in deep teal, green, and gold. The combination is not decorative in the ordinary sense. It is a collision of two serious 19th-century traditions, each demanding precision of a different kind, producing something that looks equally at home on a formal table and a garden lunch.

The botanical illustrations in the Les Fleurs collection are drawn from vintage sources: the carefully observed studies produced for horticultural journals and scientific publications across the 19th century, at a moment when the documentation of plant species was considered work of genuine intellectual importance. These were not decorative illustrations. They were records, made by trained hands, of specific plants observed at close range over time.

The marbled grounds are drawn from the tradition of the finest 19th-century bookbinders: hand-pulled patterns in which pigment floated on size produces the characteristic cellular, fluid forms that no two pulls replicate exactly. Together on a plate, the precision of the botanical and the controlled accident of the marbling produce a surface worth looking at between courses. Available in 9″ dinner and 7″ salad or dessert sizes.

A Note from Jeff

The marbled paper tradition and the botanical illustration tradition share something that is not immediately obvious: both require the practitioner to surrender a degree of control. The marblist cannot fully dictate where the pigment will go; the botanical illustrator cannot improve on what the plant actually looks like. What both produce, when the work is done well, is something that looks inevitable rather than designed. That quality is what I wanted on a party plate: something that looks as though it could not have been otherwise.

The Les Fleurs collection is the first in what will be an expanding range of original designs for the table. These plates are where it begins.